A nonprofit organization uses direct mail as one of its communication channels and wants to...

Managing complex constituent movement—such as "Snowbirds" who live in Florida for the winter and New York for the summer—is a classic nonprofit challenge. In the modern Nonprofit Cloud, the data model has shifted away from the simple "Mailing Address" fields on the Account/Contact toward the Contact Point Address (CPA) object.

How a Consultant Implements Seasonal Addresses:

Contact Point Address Object: Instead of adding custom fields to the Person Account, the consultant uses the related Contact Point Address object. A single donor (Person Account) can have multiple CPA records (e.g., "Summer Home" and "Winter Home").

Seasonal Fields: The CPA object includes standard fields specifically for this purpose: Seasonal Start Month/Day and Seasonal End Month/Day.

Address Synchronization: When the current date falls within the "Winter" range, the Automatic Person Account Mailing Address Synchronization can ensure that the "Winter" address is marked as Is Primary, which then mirrors that address into the standard mailing fields on the Person Account record for use in direct mail exports.

Usage Type: Each CPA record can be categorized using the Usage Type field (e.g., Home, Work, Temporary).

Using Multiple Contact Point Address records is the architecturally sound approach because it maintains a single "source of truth" for the person (one Person Account) while allowing for an unlimited history of geographic locations. Option A (Custom fields) is difficult to report on and scale, while Option B (Multiple records for the same person) causes data duplication and fragments the donor's giving history.